1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing method, and more particularly, to a color image processing method which is a pre-processing method required for retrieving a color feature descriptor used in indexing and searching a color image.
2. Description of the Related Art
In object-based digital image compression standards such as MPEG-7, color feature descriptors for indexing and searching color images are defined. A color feature descriptor is retrieved from an input image.
In the color image processing method, in order to retrieve a color feature descriptor, an input image is segmented into a plurality of regions, quantized color vectors for the segmented regions are obtained, and then the color feature descriptor of a pertinent region is determined using the quantized color vectors. However, noise components may exist in the image. Also, good color quantization is important in accurately representing color information in the image. Thus, pre-processing such as filtering or noise removal is necessarily performed before quantization.
Conventionally, in order to remove noise from an image, filtering methods such as vector median filtering or vector directional filtering have been employed.
However, since filtering method used in conventional color image processing methods are uniformly applied to an image, non-noisy pixels may be modified, which causes edge blurring in the original image.